Dr. Langdon Brown
Gilkey
Male
United States of America
1919-02-09
Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, United States of America
2004-11-19
Charlottesville, Charlottesville City, Virginia, United States of America
Langdon Gilkey, 85, one of the most influential American Christian theologians of the 20th century, a Protestant theologian who wrote of the relevance of God in a "time of troubles," died of meningitis Nov. 19 2004 at the University of Virginia hospital in Charlottesville.
He once quoted theologian Edgar Brightman as having said, "I believe in God because I believe that history represents a steady, moral progress."
To Dr. Gilkey, whose formative experience was spending World War II in a Japanese internment camp, the opposite was true: "I believe in God because to me history precisely does not represent such a progress."
Long based at the University of Chicago, he wrote some 20 books and hundreds of scholarly papers that explored the meaning of religion in an increasingly secular age. His career also touched on aspects of the civil rights era, Vatican II reforms and the controversy over creationism and evolution.
His testimony in a landmark 1981 case affecting Arkansas public schools helped end a state requirement that gave creation science "parallel treatment" with evolution.
Langdon Brown Gilkey was born in Chicago on Feb. 9, 1919. His father was Rev. Charles Gilkey, a liberal Baptist minister and first dean of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago and his mother was Geraldine Gunsaulus Brown a well known feminist and leader of the YWCA and daugher of Clarence Talmadge Brown, the first Protestant minister to gather a congregation in Salt Lake City.
Despite his father's profession, Dr, Gilkey said, "religion, or interest in it, played absolutely no part in my personal or my intellectual life. . . . I was, I suppose, an ethical humanist if I was anything."
Dr. Gilkey attended elementary school at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, and in 1936 graduated from the Asheville School for Boys in North Carolina.
At Harvard University, where he was a classmate of John F. Kennedy', Pete Seeger, and of future Cardinal Avery Dulles', he began to develop pacifist beliefs. After traveling to Europe with the Harvard tennis team at the onset of World War II, he and Dulles formed a Keep America Out of the War Committee. Both soon felt distress that other members were equating Adolf Hitler's cruelties with British colonialism.In 1939 he earned an A.B. degree in Philosophy, magna cum laude, from Harvard.
Conflicted between war and his sense of humanistic idealism, he went on his father's suggestion in April 1940 to hear the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr speak at Harvard chapel. Niebuhr lectured on the role of religion and faith in the midst of world power struggles.
"Suddenly," Dr. Gilkey wrote, "as the torrent of insight poured from the pulpit, my world in disarray spun completely around, steadied and then settled into a new and quite firm and intelligible structure. . . . My conversion -- and that is the right word -- was quick and complete."
That same year he went to China to teach English at Yenching University and was subsequently imprisoned in 1943 by the Japanese, first under house arrest at the University and later in an internment camp near the city of Weihsien in Shantung Province (where Eric Liddell was a fellow internee)
In Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure (1968), Gilkey narrates his departure from the liberal Protestant belief system during his two-and-a-half years.imprisonment. Captured with thousands of other enemy nationals, he was sent to an internment camp, where he remained in wretched conditions until the end of the war.
As camp mason, cook and kitchen administrator, he saw the effect of living in such cramped quarters -- squabbles caused by limited resources and hope. "This internment camp reduced society, ordinarily large and complex, to viewable sizes and by subjecting life to greatly increased tension laid bare its essential structures," he wrote.
With the war's end, Dr. Gilkey moved to New York to study international law. He grew bored and instead switched to Union Theological Seminary with Niebuhr as his theology instructor.
In the summer of 1949,while serving as a teaching assistant at Union Theological Seminary, he met social worker Dorothy Bottom who was taking classes at Union. They were married shortly thereafter in Newport News, Va., and moved to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where Dr. Gilkey was a professor at Vassar. He was a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University from 1950 to 1951.
In 1954, Dr. Gillkey received his doctorate in religion from Columbia University and then accepted a teaching position at Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nashville,Tenn.. There, he protested the expulsion of a black Divinity School student, James Lawson, who had organized peaceful sit-in demonstrations for civil rights. The family temporarily relocated to Munich Germany in 1961 when Dr. Gilkey received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study at Tubingen University. After that the couple separated, and Dorothy and her son moved to New York City.
After teaching at Vassar College from 1951 to 1954 and Vanderbilt University Divinity School from 1954 to 1963 Dr. Gilkey joined the Chicago faculty in 1963, he combined his interest in social activism with a brilliant outpouring of scholarly literature that made him one of the most enduring and respected of faculty members.
He also traveled widely, venturing to Rome on a Guggenheim fellowship during the Second Vatican Council. The result was his book "Catholicism Confronts Modernity" (1975), considered a respectful view from an outsider about the reforms of Vatican II. While on sabbatical in 1970, he taught at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands; in 1975 he taught at Kyoto University in Japan, his lecture series there focusing on the environmental perils of industrialization.
As the "Death of God" movement came to full prominence by the 1960s, Dr. Gilkey tried to show the relevance of religious discourse about God. He maintained that his personal and social experiences still made religion pertinent in addressing questions of human existence and value.
"The question for our age," he once wrote, "may well become, not will religion survive, as much as will we survive and with what sort of religion, a creative or demonic one?"
In Creationism on Trial: Evolution and God at Little Rock (1985), he recounted his experience as an expert witness for the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1981 McLean v. Arkansas lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of an article passed by the Arkansas State Legislature mandating that creationist views be taught alongside evolutionary theory in high schools. The authors of the law had been careful not to couch their intent in religious terms, but Dr. Gilkey remained unpersuaded.
There, in what was called a “modern day version of the Scopes Monkey Trial,” he argued against Christian fundamentalist claims that “creation-science” was a science, as distinct from religion cloaked as science.
"A creator is certainly a god," he said in court, "if he brings the universe into existence from nothing."
Dr. Gilkey argued that religion and science could maintain authoritative voices in their own realms and that one did not necessarily conflict with the other.
Dr. Gilkey's Chicago colleagues expressed apprehension not about his expert witness qualifications, but about his appearance.
"Before he left, we made him cut his hair, put on a tie and get rid of the beads and earrings," renowned theologian Dr. Martin Marty remembered. "Because there was no way he could have survived in an Arkansas courtroom."
Years later, Dr. Gilkey told a reporter that continued movements "to put God back" in the public schools "are efforts to put somebody's God back in but not somebody else's."
Dr. Gilkey's own spiritual interests spread to Buddhism and Sikhism. He took yoga classes and studied at Sikh summer retreats in New Mexico.
fter retiring from the University of Chicago in 1989, he settled in Charlottesville and lectured at the University of Virginia and Georgetown University.During this last period of his teaching career, he was also for one year a visiting professor at the Theology Division (now Divinity School) of Chung Chi College, the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
His marriage to Dorothy Bottom ended in divorce.
Survivors include his wife of 41 years, Sonja Weber Gilkey of Charlottesville; their son Amos Welcome Gilkey, daughter Frouwkje Gilkey Pagani, grandson Theo Gilkey Pagani and son-in-law Stephane Pagani, and Whitney [Mark Whitney], his son with Dorothy Bottom, Laurie and Sophie Gilkey.
See the Washington Post Monday, November 22, 2004; Page B06; University of Chicago News Release Tuesday, November 23, 2004, New York Times, November 26, 2004 (correction December 13, 2004)
1937 - 1940
1
6
2
1940 - Rhode Island Clay Courts (Amateur)
Final
Dr. Langdon Brown Gilkey 1 *
Robert J. (Bob) Freedman
6-3
5-7
6-4
6-1
Round 3
Albert Henry Horton 1 *
Dr. Langdon Brown Gilkey
3-6
2-5
ret.
Round 1
Dr. Langdon Brown Gilkey 1 *
William Crum Thompson
6-3
6-2
Round 2
Charles Hare 1 *
Dr. Langdon Brown Gilkey
6-4
6-3
Quarterfinals
Albert Henry Horton 1 *
Dr. Langdon Brown Gilkey
6-1
6-3
Quarterfinals
Paul Guibord 1 *
Dr. Langdon Brown Gilkey
7-5
6-4